Electronic messaging is an important function for garnering data for personal consumption and for sharing data with other individuals, organizations, or entities. Conventional electronic messaging solutions such as electronic mail (hereafter “email”) applications, servers, and platforms allow users to receive email, compose email, forward email, send email, carbon copy (cc) email, blind cc email and reply to email. Moreover, reviewing content included in an email often requires several “click troughs” of a mouse or other user interface device to access the content. For example, one click through may be necessary to open an email in a user's inbox or other email folder, another click through may be necessary to access a web page/site in a hyperlink or image included in a body of the email message. It is estimated that one-third of users are lost for each click through required to access email content. From a user point of view, an inbox or other email folder may contain an overwhelming amount of visual information created by a large number of email messages from a large number of different email sources, such as advertisers, businesses, financial institutions, invoices for bills, newsletters, social networks, professional networks, special interests groups, friends, colleagues and family, just to name a few.
In some instances there may be redundant emails from the same source and/or there may be emails from sources the user is subscribed to but is no longer interested in receiving. In any case, visually parsing through the disparate assembly of email messages and the concomitant click troughs that may be required to access the content of each email may result in the user unsubscribing from an email source or ignoring email from an email source due to the number of required to access content. The unsubscribe requests from users may be regarded as a “churn rate” that is undesirable for a publisher or other source of the email.
On a weekly basis, if a publisher has a 0.3% churn rate, then that publisher may lose 5% of its subscribers on an annual basis with a concomitant loss of revenue to the publisher from advertising, etc. In many cases, the unsubscribing user may actually like the content being provided by the publisher, but is compelled to downsize the amount of emails that he/she is receiving due to an overwhelming amount of emails being received from many disparate sources and the burden of having to visually sort through and decide which emails to react to or to ignore or delete. For example, faced with a large number of emails in an inbox, a user may permanently delete emails they regard as less important. As another example, a user has subscribed to a source of emails (e.g., a newsletter, etc.) and those emails are received in the user's inbox. The user may actually want to receive the subscribed to emails, but doesn't want them in their regular inbox. Due to email overload, the user may elect to unsubscribe from the emails even though they initially subscribed to the emails and may actually still want to receive them.
Conventional presentation of email messages using a subject line format may not convey enough useful information to allow a user to decide whether or not to open the email to divine its content. For example, an email may include text and images; however, the user may not see the image portion until at least one or more click troughs, and the image portion of the content if known without having to click through may be more informative to the user in making a decision to dive further into the content of an email message or to ignore or delete the email message, as opposed to just the text presented in the subject line. In other cases, the visual parsing of a folder or inbox may be fatiguing to a user and result in the user overlooking an email of interest because it is not visually prominent and/or noticeable when presented among other emails in that folder or inbox.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for electronic mail processing and visual presentation to a user that addresses limitations of conventional techniques and/or reduce churn rate.
It is to be understood that, in the drawings, like reference numerals designate like structural elements. Also, it is understood that the drawings are not necessarily to scale.